They didn't talk much, waiting. There wasn't a comfortable register for it — not quite silence, not quite conversation, just the specific suspended quiet of two people standing in a hallway with their whole futures sitting behind a closed door neither of them had any power to open early.
Margaret and Reese found her forty minutes in, having apparently been camped in the building on the theory that Zarina would need people nearby regardless of the outcome, and settled into the plastic chairs along the wall with the specific loyalty of friends prepared to wait as long as required.
"How'd it go," Margaret asked, quiet, careful not to jinx anything with too much enthusiasm.
"I don't know. I said the true things. I don't know if the true things were the right things, in the way this room nee
